As much as releasing hardware that brings in competition and products at great prices is essential for AMD, backing it up with software is equally important. Company slides that point to tentative time-scales that pertain to AMD's software releases have surfaced. Some of the important software products AMD releases are Catalyst driver suite for ATI products and OverDrive, a tool that provides features to tweak AMD processors and graphics cards, as well as several motherboard parameters for motherboards equipped with AMD chipsets.

The slides also provide a sneak-peak into what could be in store with those releases. VR-Zone has published slides, from which the first one points to release dates for the Catalyst driver suite with respect to release candidates and public releases. The second slide points to time-scales at which software with vital changes are released. We are already past August and AMD has rolled out the feature pertaining to that release, allowing Hybrid Crossfire of AMD chipsets with integrated graphics working in tandem with Radeon HD 3400 series graphics accelerators.

Coming up in October is a new version of AMD OverDrive (ver. 2.2), and in the graphics technologies front, a Catalyst suite that could bring in support for multi-stream MPEG-2 standard definition content along with what looks like a Linux driver that brings in support for HDCP content playback (such as Blu-ray discs) on the Linux operating system. You will notice they also mentioned "OEM Only". This means that manufacturers could release inexpensive HTPC machines with AMD hardware and customised software (read: Linux OS) that deals with all tasks of the HTPC. With HDCP compliance, AMD ends up with a practical solution for propagating HTPCs and taking it closer to the consumer electronics niche. All this comes out with version 8.54 of the Catalyst suite.

Another marker is placed at the release point of the 8.56 release that reads "Lower UVD Power States for Windows Vista/XP". Perhaps this has something to do with optimizing the shaders or the software that makes these shaders process high definition video. Improved code could result in better operation of the hardware. And finally, come April 2009 and AMD would have the newer RS880 core-logic ready, as indicated by the marker at version 8.60, that claims to being in "improved multimedia capabilities."

Excellent job finding these roadmaps btarunr. Now we can finally expect what and when ATI/AMD will make their next move in both worlds, hope Intel and Nvidia employees are not viewing these or they will probably retaliate.